In the new world’s earliest days, there was no one to speak ill of carbon dioxide, or methane, or even hydrogen cyanide. Under lightning and harsh sunlight those chemicals merged to stain the young ocean with amino acids, purines, adenylates … a “primeval soup” which then reacted still further, building complex, twisting polymers.

Mere random fusings would have taken a trillion years to come up with anything as complex as a bacterium. But something else was involved beyond just haphazard chemistry. Selection. Some molecules were stable, while others broke apart easily. The sturdy ones accumulated, filling the seas. These became letters in a new alphabet.

They, too, reacted to form still larger clusters, a few of which survived and accrued … the first genetic words. And so on. What would otherwise have taken a trillion years was accomplished in a relative instant. Sentences bounced against each other, mostly forming nonsense paragraphs. But a few had staying power.

Before the last meteorite storm was over or the final roaring supervolcano finally subsided, there appeared within the ocean a chemical tour de force, surrounded by a lipid-protein coat. An entity that consumed and excreted, that made true copies of itself. One whose daughters wrought victories, suffered defeats, and multiplied.

Out of alphabet soup there suddenly was told a story.

A simple tale as yet. Primitive and predictable. But still, a raw talent could be read there.

The author began to improvise.

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546] Steering Committee Report.

For weeks now there’s been a marathon debate going on over in subgroup six (techno-cures), category nine, forum five, concerning the relative merits of nano-constructors versus Von Neumann machines as possible sources of wealth to replace our tired planet’s exhausted mines and wells.

The word “exhausted” applies as well to the weary moderators of this tag-team endurance round. Finally the forum chair said, “Enough already! Don’t any of you people have jobs? Families?”

We agree. It’s all very well to talk about how these two technologies might someday “generate enough wealth to make even TwenCen America look like a Cro-Magnon tribe.” But one of the purposes of this SIG is to take ideas beyond mere speculation and offer the world feasible plans!

So let’s call a pause on this one, people. Get some sleep. Say hello to your children. Come back when you can show a workable design for a truly sophisticated machine that can make copies of itself—whether grazing on lunar soils or swimming in a nutrient bath. Then the rest of us will happily supply the carping criticism you’ll need to make it work.

In sharp contrast, the soc-sci freaks in group two have had some very witty forums about the current fad of applying tribal psychology to urban populations. At one point over half a million Net users were tapping in, taking our SIG, once more, all the way up to commercial-grade use levels! Digest-summaries of those forums are already available, and we commend group two’s organizers for running such a lively, productive debate.